Sunday, 4 September 2011

Second prize....

Alistair Darling has his book out: One Thousand and One Nights, the steamy tales told by an intelligent but unlucky courtesan who found herself married to an irascible knife-throwing sultan in the days of the Scottish Raj.

It features the laugh-a-minute bawdy escapade "It Started in America" and the x-rated erotic thriller "The Thief, The Prime Minister, His Lover and Their Banker".

The book was originally going to be called "My old job and how I expect to get paid twice" but McKernan is thought to have suggested that something sexier would go better in the run-up-to-Christmas market. Possibly something with cats on the cover, such as a white Persian being stroked by a podgy male hand.

Do not miss Alistair performing live the Dance of the Seven Veils, various venues all round the country. You would not belieeeve the tattoos.

I always found it harder than it should have been get angy with him because it would have been like getting angry with Sooty when logically, you know it's really somebody's hand animating a glove puppet.

It's good that he really has dropped Brown in the shite and he definately states his promotion was more about chance than would normally have been necessary. He was a perfectly reasonable Chancellor and with a pragmatic set of principles. Mervyn King was outrageous to jump Tory but someone had to say it. It's a shame that the leadership of the Labour party was so toxic but for 2 lads to have it by the balls for 3 and most likely 4 & 5 leaders is testement to how centralised the party is. NO DEBATE - no discussion.

I'm guessing that Mr Smith is quite tired after how things have been over the last couple of years.

Despite his vast knowledge he has never managed to harden-off in to cynicism and is very bad at looking away in order to protect his eyes. He's reluctant to accept the comfort of religion and his youthful idealism remains undimmed, which means that he's permanently doomed to disappointment and feels every single one of them as badly now as when he was 17 on that blues-remembered Isle of Wight. Only now, he can't even take anything for it.

He's not even much good at ignoring misspellings and wrongly placed apostrophes, even though he gave himself such a severe talking-to on the subject.

It is quite possible his family and doctors disapprove of the effect that living too much on the glass-side has had to him. They may have demanded that he spends his time blood-side, with them. Turn off the telly, internet and don't buy any papers for a while. It's a retreat, but it protects the soul.

I hold a faith that if Anything Was Wrong, he'd have arranged for a message of some sort to be left, if only one saying goodbye, and he has not done that, so I assume he's harvesting rhubarb and putting the garden to bed for the winter.

If he is in trouble, I wish he'd send up a smoke signal. If there is anything I can do, I will do it.

If you are asking about the monetary value, I'd take an uneducated guess that staying out of the Euro more than offsets selling the gold too cheap, but it would be a wild guess because I don't have a sensible way of assessing the value of not doing something.

If you are asking about the moral value, that has to be weighed against whether Brown was doing it because he thought that was the best thing for the country (unlikley), or if he just wanted to get even with Blair and deny him the leadership of Europe, or if he simply didn't want to hand over power to anyone else - which is consistent with his general behaviour.

So yes, it does mitigate it but only to the level where Brown did the right thing but for the wrong reason.